Fashion

What impious mockery, when with soulless art
Fashion, intrusive, seeks to rule the heart;
Directs how grief may tastefully be borne;
Instructs Bereavement just how long to mourn;
Shows Sorrow how by nice degrees to fade,
And marks its measure in a riband's shade!
More impious still, when through her wanton laws
She desecrates Religion's sacred cause;
Shows how "the narrow road" is easiest trod,
And how genteelest, worms may worship God;
How sacred rites may bear a worldly grace,
And self-abasement wear a haughty face;
How sinners, long in Folly's mazes whirl'd,
With pomp and splendour may "renounce the world;"
How "with all saints hereafter to appear,"
Yet quite escape the vulgar portion here!
"the press.
O might the muse prolong her flowing rhyme,
(Too closely cramp'd by unrelenting Time,
Whose dreadful scythe swings heedlessly along,
And, missing speeches, clips the thread of song),
How would she strive in fitting verse to sing
The wondrous progress of the printing king!
Bibles and novels, treatises and songs,
Lectures on "rights," and strictures upon wrongs;
Verse in all metres, travels in all climes,
Rhymes without reason, sonnets without rhymes;
"Translations from the French," so vilely done,
The wheat escaping, leaves the chaff alone;
Memoirs, where dunces sturdily essay
To cheat Oblivion of her certain prey;
Critiques, where pedants vauntingly expose
Unlicensed verses in unlawful prose;
Lampoons, whose authors strive in vain to throw
Their headless arrows from a nerveless bow;
Poems by youths, who, crossing Nature's will,
Harangue the landscape they were born to till;
Huge tomes of law, that lead by rugged routes
Through ancient dogmas down to modern doubts,
Where judges oft, with well-affected ease,
Give learned reasons for absurd decrees,
Or, more ingenious still, contrive to found
Some just decision on fallacious ground —
Or blink the point, and haply, in its place,
Moot and decide some hypothetic case;
Smart epigrams, all sadly out of joint,
And pointless, save the "exclamation point,"
Which stands in state, with vacant wonder fraught,
The pompous tombstone of some pauper thought;
Ingenious systems based on doubtful facts,
"Tracts for the times," and most untimely tracts;
Polemic pamphlets, literary toys,
And "easy lessons" for uneasy boys;
Hebdomadal gazettes and daily news,
Gay magazines and quarterly reviews:
Small portion these of all the vast array
Of darken'd leaves that cloud each passing day,
And pour their tide unceasingly along,
A gathering, swelling, overwhelming throng!